Purge of felons from voter rolls is halted after judge's ruling

By GREGORY ROBERTS, P-I REPORTER

Published 9:00 pm, Monday, March 27, 2006

The state has halted its purge of felons from the voter rolls because of a judge's ruling Monday that tosses out part of the law disenfranchising convicts, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Sam Reed said.

King County Superior Court Judge Michael Spearman declared unconstitutional the state law that includes payment of all fines, fees and court costs among the obligations that a felon must meet to win back voting rights.

That requirement violates the equal-protection provisions of both the state and federal constitutions because it discriminates against poor felons, Spearman said.

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Reed has not decided if he will appeal the ruling, the spokeswoman said.

Washington is one of several states that disenfranchise felons until they complete their prison terms and probations, perform any community service required and pay off all their financial obligations.

Some states restore voting rights once prison terms and probation are over, some upon release from prison and two (Maine and Vermont) do not deny felons the vote.

Of the state's 159,000 disenfranchised felons in 2000, nearly 33,000 had completed their prison terms and probations, according to a 2002 study.

A lawsuit challenging the financial-obligations requirement was filed in 2004 by three felons who have completed all other parts of their sentence but have been unable to pay their fines and fees. The state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union supported the suit.

"Today's ruling puts an end to this modern form of the poll tax," state ACLU Executive Director Kathleen Taylor said in a news release.

In his summary judgment for the plaintiffs, Spearman wrote, "It is well-recognized that there is simply no rational relationship between the ability to pay and the exercise of constitutional rights."

The issue of felons voting played a central role in the Republican lawsuit that challenged the narrow victory by Democrat Christine Gregoire in the November 2004 governor's election.

The GOP claimed that hundreds of illegal votes by felons tainted Gregoire's 129-vote victory. To prove that felons who cast ballots were not legally entitled to vote, Republican researchers combed court records to establish the voters had not paid their financial obligations.

In a 2005 trial, Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges agreed that hundreds of felons had voted illegally. But he said the GOP had not met the requirement of proving Gregoire owed her victory to illegal votes, and he rejected the challenge.

As called for by a 2002 federal law, a statewide voter-registration database that merged individual county voter rolls went online early this year. The new database is linked to state police and prison records, and elections officials said that would make it much easier to flag illegally registered felons and purge them from the rolls.

Reed was to complete the initial felon purge Friday, the end of the first quarter of the year. Because of Spearman's ruling, the initial purge will be rolled back to the second quarter and will not affect felons who have completed all their legal obligations save the financial ones, Reed's spokeswoman said.